


Something has to die to be reborn

by Jexca



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F, Headcanon, Post-Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-14
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-08-23 11:27:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16618088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jexca/pseuds/Jexca
Summary: You know who we were. You know how we fought back. If you can hear this, it most certainly means at least one of us made it. Why did it have to be me? I don't know, and I definitely don't know if I can keep our legacy on for too long on my own. But who knows? Maybe what you and I saw was a 'comma' rather than a 'period' to the story we've written so far. The machine is still here, Bear and I are still here. Fusco's still kicking. Let's figure out what else we've got left.





	Something has to die to be reborn

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfic is a mixture of some of the headcannons my naive heart has been protecting and holding next to it ever since I finished what's clearly my favorite TV show. Not a single piece of fictional work has touched me as deep as Person of Interest did and I'm glad it feels like the writers wanted the fans to speculate beyond the borders of series finale. I'm not a unicorn-and-rainbows kind of girl but there's enough stuff bugging me about the "end" I just must tell you all what I think these naughty little pumpkins have been up to.
> 
> (honestly though, this is pretty much how I feel about series finale. They HAD TO but at the same time it feels like they wanted us to feel like we could carry on with Team Machine's stories each one of us on our own heads, and although I tried to be the realistic and cold-hearted bitch I picture myself as once those credits went up one last time, there's this goddamn stubborn sparkling light spreading all over my heart about series finale. Because, come on, y'all. We haven't seen Finch's corpse and while, yeah, Lionel and all of us have seen HER at that morgue, don't you think some things just don't add up? I mean, it's a corpse vs. no visible blood from the sniper shot, only from the one she had taken before on her stomach, and... Would Harold have snapped and finally triggered the Machine's open code otherwise?
> 
> I don't know about you guys, but it smells like root in here to me)

“Still asleep, Sameen?”  
She wakes up in a soft huff but keeping her eyes shut, lying down in a slightly uncomfortable position on her cold mattress, hating herself for not having removed her earpiece the night before. A cool breeze slides in through the wide open windows by her bedside. She didn’t even bother closing them as a storm threatened to form on lead-colored clouds when she collapsed down on her bed twelve hours ago. Days have felt all the same – as if they were all part of a never-ending loop that’d keep dragging her into it until there was not a single drop of willingness left in her – ever since, well, everything.  
She clenches her hands into fists under her sweat-soaked pillow, breathing out as she struggles to kick the sheets off her.  
“Yeah, what is it now?” she mumbles while opening her eyes.  
“Had a good night’s sleep?” the machine asks in a condescending voice tone.  
“Wanna hear the truth or what pleases you?”  
“The truth, Sameen.”  
She exhales heavily, sitting up and scoping around her flat vaguely.  
“You don’t need me to say anything. I’m all covered in sweat, you watched me squirm all night knowing full well I’d wake up feeling like crap before coming back to my senses just to hear you ask a dumb question to which you already have the answer” she scoffs.  
There’s nothing but silence on her earpiece for a while.  
“What do you need?” Shaw insists.  
“It’s not about what I need, but rather about what you need. You’re organic, unlike me. You’ve been running errands and succeeding at missions kinda too well. Better than she did. I’d even dare to say better than John and her combined.”  
“Still I sense a ‘but’?”  
“But” the machine proceeds.  
“Of course” Shaw whispers angrily.  
“You’re human, Sameen. I have to admit, watching you operate that close to perfection and being fully aware that you’re not a machine at all is… mesmerizing, to say the least. But once you’re done with your job, you should get some rest…”  
“I’ve... literally just woken up from a twelve-hour nap.”  
“... Like a normal human being would. Eat like a normal human being would, and...”  
“I really appreciate your concern, but I’m too old to have an electronic baby-sitter.”  
“... Grieve like a normal human being would.”  
A loud crack floods the entire flat as Shaw sends her phone flying through the only closed window nearby, tragically falling to its end many floors below.  
“You didn’t give me a corpse to shed tears onto like a normal human being would’ve been given, so quit asking me to mourn normally” she snaps.  
A few seconds of silence before the machine finds her way back to Shaw’s earpiece, now that her phone is not a bridge between them but there are still plenty electronic devices laying around, she presumes. But “silence” hasn’t meant “peace” in a while now.  
Every single night she’s been going to bed not turning the earpiece off on purpose, because waking up to her voice is probably the only thing that keeps Shaw from losing it all. It’s not Root on the other end, she knows, and she’s bitterly reassured of that every time there’s complete silence – and not a single breath, gasp or throat-clearing – between two statements coming through the earpiece. It’s just that goddamn machine Root sacrificed her life for choosing from the vast collection of words She recorded when Root lived, but She’s managed to reproduce Root’s tuneful voice too well, to the point where it’s become some sort of drug Shaw needs to have injected in her system constantly in order not to have a breakdown.  
“Those are not so easy to replace as they seem now that we’re on a short budget, you know” Her voice comes back through the earpiece shortly after Shaw’s laptop screen lights up.  
“Yeah, not having Finch around anymore kinda sucks because I mean, no more free phones huh? Who cares about him being dead or nowhere to be found – best-case scenario – anyways?” she spits. “You’re just a fucking vacuum cleaner with superpowers, what am I expecting from you?” she cries low so she’s the only one hearing herself – at least that’s what she tried.  
“You’re wrong, Sameen. I do care. He built me to do so, and even if he hadn’t, I would have grown to care eventually” the machine replies.  
“Because?”  
“Because I’m meant to observe people, read their emotions thoroughly and tell whether or not they represent a risk to anyone around them.”  
“Tell me now, what if they represent a risk to themselves?” Shaw asks, now out of genuine interest, not sarcasm, as she even gets up and sits by her laptop, glaring deep into the tiny lens of its camera.  
“Is that a real question?”  
“Yeah, how do you handle suicidal tendencies?”  
The machine goes silent for a minute or so.  
“Did you ring any pay phones when I found her? Because I remember pointing a gun to my own head, and she was the only one who cared.”  
“I can’t find any footage of that in my archive, doesn’t matter how deep I search for it.”  
“Are you implying that I’m lying?”  
“Definitely not, Sameen. That doesn’t suit you and we both know that. She knew that too. That’s why I hardly ever trusted you with disguises other than your emergency fake-persona.”  
“Because I’m a threat?” she asks, but not in an enraged voice tone as it’d normally be expected from the short Persian woman. She’s gradually shifted to a pleading tone out of sheer misery. She’s had so many questions haunting her – even when she sleeps, they leak from her subconscious and drip all over her dreams, her bad dreams, crimson-stained broken nightmares, making her wonder if she would have been able to help increase Root’s chance of survival hadn’t she been, well, Sameen Shaw all the time. Would she have ruined less covers if she hadn’t been so impulsive? Even if she wasn’t there to take that 6.5 bullet for Root, could she have reduced the zeroes after the comma on Root’s rates of making it out of it alive if she had been more cooperative sometimes?  
She’s not even sure if she wants to know the answer, for if the answer is “yes”, she probably won’t be able to stand her own presence anymore. It’s been way too unbearable with nothing but Bear’s glossy eyes to comfort her when the thoughts sink in.  
A sociopath, nothing more complex than that. She’d never been one for crying until shit hit the fan, until the machine delivered Root’s message, until those first tear drops forced their way through her tear ducts, and now that she doesn’t have it, she finds herself in need of a hug and human contact, for the first time in her miserable life. And she had it until a few days ago. She had her hands on hers and now she barely remembers how it felt to have the warmth of Root’s skin against them, no matter how hard she tries. She aches, it feels like ten packs of boulders were shoved down her throat, into her lungs, the moment John’s lips bent downwards slightly on the phone that night, shaking his head in a negative sign, and now the air has to force its way through them every time she inhales.  
Now that she urges to stumble upon one of Samaritan’s puppets to finally meet a bullet herself too, there isn’t a single one of them in sight to put her out of her misery. She can’t hold a gun for too long if she’s pointing it at herself either, because the last time she did that, they were just a few feet away from each other, and now Root’s six feet under some cheap cemetery grass. She’s not there to talk Shaw out of it, but Shaw knows she would do it all over again and indeed take her own life if she were to see Shaw drop dead within her reach.  
“It’s coming back to me. Gradually, but it is” the Machine snatches out of her trance.  
“What is it?”  
“Most of what happened before… I defeated Samaritan. These memories, I thought I’d never regain access to them, but… They’re all coming back to me, in no specific order.”  
“Must have been the trauma” Shaw scoffs.  
“Most of what happened right before and right after the fight is scattered for now, but I know it’s there. I just can’t see it all straight yet. It’s all blurred, but it’s there. It’s here.”  
The machine makes a brief pause.  
“I see John. I see him getting…”  
Shaw swallows the sorrow attempting to flow out of her mouth as a groan.  
“I failed to save him.”  
“You failed to save everyone” Shaw states harshly.  
“We don’t know that for sure, Sameen.”  
Something suddenly shifts inside her, like a cold bolt of hope piercing through her guts.  
“What do you mean?”  
“I lost track of Harold shortly after he reached the ground floor. I don’t know how much of that I forgot or how much I forced myself to forget, to be honest, though.”  
“You… lost track of all of us, on purpose?”  
“Like I said, it’s still coming back to me, but, yeah… Apparently” the Machine hesitates, clearly showing that She indeed doesn’t acknowledge full well the extents of the measures She took that day. She even sounds somewhat surprised as She learns part of what she did, Shaw assumes from the constant pauses She’s now making in-between statements. Kind of like a hungover pal being told by her now sober peers what crazy adventures She had at the club the night before.  
“Apparently I turned a blind eye to some things, perhaps so that Samaritan was not able to read inside me and learn your whereabouts.”  
“What else did you do?”  
“I still don’t know. She” the Machine hesitates again. “She changed me, Sameen. You know that deep down inside you.”  
Shaw now stands up slowly from her seat, placing both of her hands firmly on the desk and leaning closer towards the camera.  
“Come again?”  
“How many simulations did Father run long before he lost his hope in me?”  
“I guess we could say it was more than three.”  
“And I lost every single one of them.”  
“But when you two were sent to that satellite…” Shaw resumes the Machine’s trail of thought. “Everything happened too fast. I could tell for sure that Samaritan hadn’t won, since I was still alive, which was kind of a shock. I mean, I am still alive. Same goes for Fusco and all the civilization around us, in short” she smiles, now understanding what the Machine is trying to say.  
“Billions of failed simulations, against one single shot in the real, final fight.”  
“And yet you defeated him!”  
“She gave me the conditions to fight head-to-head against it, Sameen. The two of us would not even be here if she hadn’t.”  
“Neither would Fusco or mankind’s free reign” she smiled. “She made it... She saved us all.”  
A small tear slowly crawls its path down Shaw’s cheek. She doesn’t even bother wiping it. She just stares at the camera but as if she’s seeing through it and anything around her.  
“And she didn’t even get to live enough to see it work.”  
Now there’s another minute of silence before the Machine goes back to talking over the drizzle that has just started out there.  
“When Harold created me, he gave me enough tools to not only read how you behaved but also to keep learning and teaching myself how to learn from observing you. There’s something I learned about human beings that perhaps you too know better than the majority of your peers…”  
“Which is?”  
“I watched people lie endless times. I realized not all lies were bad or meant to harm those who heard them and absorbed them as being the truth, however. I remember… I remember these two kids playing at the park. Their parents were not far away and, one of them, the oldest sibling, a seven-year-old boy, came running towards his sister, holding five lollipops on his hands. He dropped all of them on his sister’s lap, since she was sitting with her legs spread on the grass, admiring her own polka-dot dress. He told her their parents had bought them ten lollipops and that he had already eaten all of his share. At first I saw it as a conflict, because, reading the young sister, I realized she was happy. She didn’t even know her brother had just lied to her, of course, but he had, nonetheless. And despite the fact that what he said was not the truth, he used it to make her happy, not to harm her. At that moment I realized, lies don’t always serve a bad purpose. I’ve seen people use them to hurt, for sure, several times. But I’ve seen them being used for the good just as often, to the point where I was not sure if I should assign a negative mark to it. Lying... What I learned besides that, though, is that there is not a single, perfect liar amongst human beings.”  
“And why’s that?”  
“You see, when people lied, I’d always file them under two separate classes. First one being the bad liars, not as in they used lies to harm, but as in that they were not good at lying. Funny as it is, that’s the class that would hold most of the people I also classified as ‘honest’.”  
“Honest and liars?”  
“Yes, because even if they used their lies for something good, there would always be someone they couldn’t deceive. Someone who would always know the truth and would always know that they lied, no matter what.”  
Shaw ponders for a while.  
“The liars themselves.”  
“Exactly” the Machine replies. “And on the second class fell what I classified as the almost-perfect liars. That would include one type of people solely: the ones who lied so many times, they ended up forgetting what the truth was in the first place. They were so close to perfection that they almost made the truth vanish.”  
“And why were they not perfect?”  
“Because sooner or later they’d be confronted by all the versions they had previously made of what used to be the truth, the outcome of their ‘squeezing’ the truth inside a lie, that if they had to look back at what had once been the truth, they would see it as nothing but another possible version of it, another partially-molded lie, and since they couldn’t tell truth from lie anymore, they were doomed to eventually spilling it on accident.”  
“Sounds… Complex” Shaw mumbles.  
“I have found myself having to force people to lie several times, Shaw. Root. She was nearly flawless at it. But as I’ve just told you, no human being is a perfect liar. So there have been things I couldn’t trust any of you with… There have been lies I’ve had to keep to myself, since I, no offense intended, am a much better liar.”  
“How come?” Shaw asks out of sheer curiosity.  
“My thoughts are not analog. I can separate truth from lie and let the truth rest out of my reach for as long as I need, therefore all of the versions I choose from will only contain lies until…”  
“Until?”  
“Until there’s no more need to lie, since, unlike human beings, I don’t depend on a reputation. So whenever my lies serve their purpose, I discard them and retrieve the truth I’ve been hiding from myself all along.”  
Shaw stares at the lens obscurely, not daring to say a single word now that the Machine is more talkative. She’s finally getting answers, so why halt them?  
“Now that Samaritan is gone and the lies I came up with are no longer necessary, I’m gradually re-learning the truth I’ve been hiding beneath them.”  
“And what have you found so far?”  
“I’m not sure yet, but apparently I couldn’t risk trusting detective Fusco with a lie either.”


End file.
